Users of the decentralized stablecoin protocol Maker have minted $1 billion worth of the DAI stablecoin, according to Rune Christensen, CEO and co-founder of the company:

The Maker Protocol just hit 1 billion Dai for the first time ever!

Want to be a part of growing it to 10 billion and beyond?

Take a look at the collateral onboarding guide: https://t.co/dKsX7eMvjQ And earn bounties by helping onboard your favourite ERC20 tokens. pic.twitter.com/FvlinZG7lp

— Rune Christensen (@RuneKek) November 13, 2020

Unlike many other stablecoins, DAI is not minted by a central company that can decide to issue tokens at will so long as it can claim that it has sufficient reserves. Instead, DAI requires investors to actually stake cryptocurrency in order to issue tokens, meaning that its growth is presumably based on real demand.

“In just under one year since the launch of Multi-Collateral Dai, 1 billion [DAI] have been generated using Maker Vaults,” Maker noted on Twitter. Multi-Collateral Dai allowed users to stake a variety of tokens for the first time in November 2019.

Prior to this, in the Single-Collateral Dai era, it was only possible for users to stake Ethereum tokens as collateral. This suggests that the governance decision to support more tokens attracted more users to stake their cryptocurrency with the protocol.

DAI’s growth is also partially due to the fact that Maker voted to raise the debt ceiling to $1 billion on Sept. 17. Prior to that, there was approximately $500 million in stablecoin in circulation.

The coin’s $2 billion market cap makes it the third-largest stablecoin on the market, behind Tether ($17.6 billion, supported by Bitfinex) and USD Coin ($2.8 billion, supported by a joint venture between Circle and Coinbase).